The accumulating literature on the interrelationships among stressful life events, social support and depression attests to a vigorous line of inquiry which is of theoretical and practical utility. The proposed research is designed to build on this literature by emirically testing several hypotheses on social support. The subjects are 652 women who were interviewed in 1979 about their physical and psychological well-being after a stressful health experience. The purpose of the study is to replicate the work of Brown et al. (1) and that of Miller and Ingham (2), as well as to test two additional hypotheses on the role of social support as a protective buffer against depression after a stressful life event. Four questions frame the study's aim: 1. Does having a close and confiding relationship with one's husband or a male friend protect against depression and/or anxiety after a health crisis? 2. Under what conditions may a confidant other than husband/boyfriend protect against depression, i.e. are confidants sometimes interchangeable? 3. To what extent is the quality of the confiding relationship important in avoiding psychological distress? 4. Are more socially integrated women--i.e., those with large personal networks--less vulnerable to depression after a health crisis? Three measures of psychological distress will serve as the dependent variables in the analysis. They are depression, as measured by the 20-item CES-D scale developed at the Center of Epidemiologic Studies, NIMH and two measures that specifically address anxiety about health. These data provide the opportunity not only to replicate research on social support in another population, but also to extend it by a comparison of subjective and objective measures of support.